Fundraising Update #2: What If We Raised $100,000? What Then?

After zooming past our goal of $40,000in 21 hours, one couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps this campaign could enable us to be even more awesome than we’d initially imagined. Well, first we had to finish shedding our happy tears and set aside 24 hours to stare slack-jawed at the computer screen, dumbstruck by your incredible generosity and your belief in what we do — and what we can do together.

As discussed in the post about the campaign, most sites like ours launch with anywhere between $500,000 and $6 million to get their business going. Conversely, we launched with $539, so our scroll of “things we still need” is really long! Basically, everybody on formspring thinks we should declare a new goal of $100,000.

make it an even $100,000 in 45 days. Don’t be afraid to make an ask like that—especially after you’ve seen what 24 hours can do. If you’re feeling modest, Riese, let your readership propose: $100,000 IN 45 DAYS.”

On our last fundraising post, many readers suggested that sharing our Money Plans and Additional Perks with y’all would inspire more donations. So HERE WE GO!

You asked us about self-sustainability, and what that means with respect to a new website. Well, for starters, it will help our audience grow — we’ll have better search engine optimization, an easier site to navigate for newbies, a more impressive and professional feel and a social networking system that will enable us to evolve and develop a more solid online community. The more readers/viewers we have, the more we can make from advertising, merch sales, donations and events, and thus the more people we can hire and pay. Also, the more lives we can impact, the more social justice issues we can promote, the more quality artists we can support and the more awesome people we can talk to! We also hope that a larger audience will lead to a more diverse readership and a more diverse applicant pool. We also have this crazy fantasy that one day we’ll be taken seriously by the rest of the media and be included on lists like this one. Part of that fantasy is a world in which we can pay not only our own writers, but also big-name writers we’d love to see on Autostraddle that we simply can’t afford right now.

Alex has been learning the ropes of online advertising for a few years now and has a keener understanding of how to optimize advertising spaces, develop relationships with brand partners, and effectively utilize Google AdSense than we did when we initially built this thing.

Ultimately, it takes money to make money and although it may seem like we grow and change on heart alone, honestly every major evolutionary stage of this website has corresponded with an increase in financial resources. This campaign never would’ve gotten off the ground if I wasn’t able to pay people to on-board ten new writers and interns, take over merchandise shipping, edit most of the nine posts we publish every day, and handle some of the other administrative work that keeps me away from writing and masterminding. Nor would we have a redesign at all if our Design Director wasn’t earning commission from ad sales that enabled her to not need another full-time job for the time being.

We do have a specific profit-building initiative we intend to launch once we get the site re-built and gather enough money to keep Alex on full-time — but we have to keep it a secret for now so nobody steals our idea! You’ll see. You’ll like it!

And don’t worry — just because something you’ve asked of us isn’t on this list doesn’t mean we’re not doing it! We could be in the middle of making it happen right now! We have a LOT of things to do on our to do list.

So, without any further ado…

What We Plan To Do With Your Money

W+

$40,000

[less indiegogo & paypal fees – $3,200]

The 40k plan doesn’t cover the entire cost of the project — we lowballed it to avoid excessive fees (indiegogo charges 9% for campaigns that don’t reach their goal but 4% that do) and intended to pay Cee in installments over time if we weren’t able to raise enough from the campaign. We also have to pay 4.4% to indiegogo for credit card processing and 3% to paypal for paypal payment processing, regardless of whether or not we meet our goal.

What’s In It For You:

Dance Video: Alex will be doing a music dance video to the classic Robyn number, “Call Your Girlfriend.”

What’s In It For All Of Us:

This money will get us a faster, cleaner, better organized website, designed by Alex and hand-coded and developed by Cee, with a customized social networking component and a year of tech support. It won’t break down, it’ll feature responsive design that will work on all mobile platforms, and we’ll be in constant communication with you guys about how to make it better. We’re especially committed to making it easier for you to meet each other, organize meet-ups and talk about your feelings on forums.

+

$50,000

[less indiegogo & paypal fees: $4,000]

$50,000 enables us cover the entire contract for our web developer, web designer and outside experts as well as covering the indiegogo fees and some of the perks fulfillment costs.

What’s In It For You:

More Things:We’re printing “You Do You” boyshorts, as requested, and added more cookie perks and t-shirt perks to the indiegogo campaign. The cookie-baking team is going to make a menu for you and you can pick the kind of cookies you want! Also, our Australian will happily send cookies to other Australians.

+

$60,000

[less indiegogo & paypal fees: $4,800]

$60,000 enables us cover the entire contract for our web developer, web designer and outside experts as well as covering the indiegogo fees and most of the perks fulfillment costs.

What’s In It For You:

Merch:We’ll print “Autostraddle This” boxer-briefs.

Meet-ups:We will organize another International Autostraddle Meet-Up Week!

+ Alex Full-Time: This is crucial to our growth, especially our financial growth. Alex is the site’s co-founder, our Design Director and ad salesperson, and is far more competent than the other co-founder (me, Riese!) at anything involving human speech, like coordinating partnerships with other organizations and planning events. As of a few months ago, Alex doesn’t have a full-time job and that’s how this redesign even happened. But we need to keep her after unemployment runs out! Alex is the driver for most of the money-making aspects of the business, such as designing merchandise and working with advertisers, and is also our most competent “face” of the business, considering most of us get heart palpitations every time the phone rings and only attend networking events for the free cheese cubes. After our 2009 launch, Alex worked 40 hours a week for the site for 1.5 years without compensation, and when we all moved out west in 2010 and she got a full-time job, we lost her and it sucked! We would like to keep her now. Even the fact that she has another temporary part-time job right now is preventing us from moving forward as quickly as we’d like to.

$80,000

[less indiegogo + paypal fees of $6,400]

What’s In It For You:

Extra Perk for ‘Zine-Buyers: Everybody who orders or has ordered the Limited Edition ‘Zine perk will also get their choice of a “You Do You” t-shirt, home-made cookies or a hand-made card by a writer/editor of your choice.

TWO A-Camp Camperships:We’ll raffle off TWO September A-Camp Camperships and everybody who has donated who wants to attend September Camp will be invited to enter — or, if you’ve already signed up, you can win the chance to bring a friend for free! (When we reach this point, you can forward your donation confirmation email to info [at] autostraddle [dot] com to be entered.)

What’s In It For All Of Us:

+ An accountant! Seriously I spend so much time doing accounting these days. Also I have a feeling an accountant would be able to help us out w/r/t making more money.

+ Medium-sized fund earmarked to launch program to pay writers for their hard work and pay Rachel at least half of what she deserves for working full-time. (She has been working full-time for us for about two years for basically $2/hour)

$90,000

[less indiegogo + paypal fees of $7,200]

What’s In It For You:

Your Best Autostraddle Day Ever: You pick our content for the day. You’ll be invited to submit story ideas and vote on other people’s story ideas, and the most popular ideas will be written!

What’s In It For All Of Us:

+ In order to facilitate Your Best Autostraddle Day Ever and our future, we’ll be launching an ideascale (or comparable) area on the site where you’ll be able to submit your ideas, questions and concerns to us all in one happy happy place! No really, go check it out, you will want us to have that.

$100,000

[less indiegogo + paypal fees of $8,000]

What’s In It For You:

Best Music Video Ever:An epic professionally-produced-and-edited music video conceptualized by Riese, Brittani Nichols, Haviland Stillwell, Sarah Croce, Alex Vega and Ashley Reed, with appearances by every single Autostraddle team member and starring Alex Vega as a young lesbian in Los Angeles getting Tinkerbell tattooed on her ass (as she has promised to do if we raise $100,000! You can see the design on the blue button here). It will feature an original song composed by aforementioned team with the working title of “You Saved Our Ass.” We’ll even pay the people who make it! There will also be lots of celesbian special guests, TBA – we will update you as we recruit more special guests and also if you’re reading this and could be a special guest, let us know!

What’s In It For All Of Us:

+ A larger fund earmaked to pay writers/editors

From here forward I can’t tell you specifically where each dollar would go, because that’s part of what we’ll figure out as we go along and there are many factors to consider depending on the final tally.

But here’s some stuff we’ll for sure do for you if we hit these milestones:

$110,000

[less indiegogo & paypal fees of $8,800]

Queer Girl City Guidebook: We’ll create and produce Autostraddle’s Ultimate Queer Girl City Guide, a book that will show you around every city worth living/visiting, from a local perspective, chock-full of original photography and insider tips.+

+

$120,000

[less indiegogo & paypal fees of $9,600]

Let’s Get Literary Month! Autostraddle will host a short story and a poetry contest for our readers and will feature a month of material focused on queer-lady literature, with interviews, original work from established authors and personal essays from the team. Also, Riese will launch the serial fiction series she’s been conceptualizing for years (which will eventually become a memoirish novel).+

+

$130,000

[less indiegogo & paypal fees of $10,400]

Complete A-Camp Campership: We will announce the dates of A-Camp May and we will cover the complete cost of tuition and transportation (up to $1,200) for an A-Camp Aspirant who lives outside of the United States to come experience the magic.

+

$150,000

[less indiegogo + paypal fees of $12,000]

Mobile App: We’ll make a really good one!

+

$200,000

[less indiegogo + paypal fees of $16,000]

TOUR!Autostraddle will go on tour, doing readings, workshops and presentations all over the country at colleges and performance venues, featuring a rotating roster of participating Team members.

by intern geneva

OK, now it’s your turn to donate or to solicit donations from other people! Donate now!

Riese is the 33-year-old CEO, CFO and Editor-in-Chief of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, blogger, fictionist, copywriter, video-maker and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York City, and now lives in The Bay Area. Her work has appeared in nine books including "The Bigger the Better The Tighter The Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty, Body Image & Other Hazards Of Being Female," magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are!

Dear God. I want so many of these things. The Queer City Guide sounds amazing, and I fucking want that coloring book so badly. And fucking cookies. You’re going to make me fucking cookies. Goddammn everybody donate right the fuck meow.

one time, my friend was meditating with her creative writing class, and after, another girl came up to her and said “i think it’s really cool how you got so into it that you drooled on yourself.” and my friend, a little embarrassed, wipes her chin and goes “oh. um. yeah. i mean it was just a little bit” and the other girl tactlessly says “no, you drooled all over your shirt!” and my friend had. but this other girl thought it was awesome.

So I already donated but last night I had a dream about the Autostraddle cw and then I saw this today and I totally got offered a job today too. So if all that isn’t a sign that I need to donate more then I do not know what is.

I also had an Autostraddle dream. I moved to NYC and somehow there was an AS event in my new apartment. Everyone played instruments, and they wanted me to play one too, so I picked up a guitar. The rest is history.

I once realized in a dream that I was having a dream and instead of doing the sensible thing and having sex with Megan Fox/Mila Kunis within the dream, I proceeded to chase a seagull around and try to put a bodywarmer on it.

I’d like to draw the parallels between this fundraiser and the film ‘Field of Dreams’…

If you build it, they will come…

Riese, Lesbians will come Riese. They’ll come to Autostraddle for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they’re doing it possibly for cookies, maybe for NSFW Lesbosexy Sunday. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won’t mind if you look around, you’ll say. It’s only $20 per person, $20 per person can insure that the AS team eat and drink heartily, basking in the fruits of their labour. They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it, the thought of Alex Vega dancing a whispered promise that they’ll do anything to see, for it is money they have and strong queer media outlets with light humored articles that they lack. And they’ll walk out to the bleachers at A-Camp, sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon, Singing songs of Tegan and Sara and talking of who killed Jenny.And they’ll watch the website blossom and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces aswell as their tears of joy and laughter at being able to read anything involving Julie Goldman without wanting to hate fuck the shit out autostraddle for being so awesome yet so slow. People will come Riese. The one constant through all the years, Riese, has been TRLW recaps. the queer community has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But TRLW recaps has marked the time. This website, that strap on scene from season one: it’s a part of our past, Riese. It reminds of us of all that was once good and it could be again. Oh… Lesbians will come Riese. Lesbians will most definitely come.

I had a dream that Croce and I were going to a steer food festival here in Denver called justice League of Street food and it was Halloween. She was dressed as a pirate. We ran into Hannah Hart and brought her with us. She was dressed as a bunny, obvs. Then we waited in a line for street tacos and complimented each other on the great costumes.
What’s really weird is that I never remember my dreams. But I remembered this.

Is it creepy/stalkery to say I wish I had an address I could send homemade thank you cards to for amazing people like Alex and Rachel and all of the other amazing people on the team who work so hard for us? It’s incredibly inspiring to watch this site grow online and to experience the expansion of community in our daily lives. Thank you guys for all you do!

So this whole thing is glorious, but what I really love is all the Price Is Right “Cliffhanger” game feels I’m getting from that Autostraddle Tour photo. Am I wrong?

Also, the coloring book is such a fun idea! I just found an old He-Man coloring book from my childhood with hardly any of the pages colored. I think an Autostraddle page next to a freshly colored portrait of Evil-Lyn will compliment each other nicely.

I don’t have any money at all. I’m still trying to scratch up 500 more dollars to make my first payment for classes before they start in 3 weeks. I totally want to help though, is there anything else I can do?

And I want one for Anchorage, and London, and Gay, Georgia (official population as of 2011 is 88.) I mean, it’s not like you’re the most awesome lesbian website in the history of ever and where I spend most of my time online outside of Tumblr! I demand more! Your kittens and cookies cannot tempt me!
…
…
…
Except somehow my bank statement reads twenty bucks to the Excitant Group?

If the goddesses allowed I’d happily volunteer to do said recaps! Especially Firefly/Serenity, Dollhouse and Dr. Horrible. I’m a little rusty on my Buffy (and I don’t think I ever really did Angel) but I have those ones pretty much memorized. Also it gives me a space to wax on about Felicia Day and Morena Baccarin as well as an excuse to sit around and watch netflix and actually use some of the hundreds of Whedon-verse screencaps and gifs I got up in hurr (I hoard jpegs and livejournal is an enabler) so… yeah.

i think i have to email you now about all my feelings w/r/t the parallels of firefly/serenity/dollhouse, and how it all seems to connect to the warren plot of buffy, and how fascinating it is to literally watch whedon’s brain work, and also how i just discovered the buffy comics and they changed my life, and also also also so we can discuss motherfucking morena baccarin oh my dear lord.

???
feel free to email me your theory about how Firefly/Dollhouse seems to connect to the Warren plot, I am all ears.

Also, on the subject of Morena Baccarin: I rewatched Firefly recently and when I got to Our Mrs. Reynolds I realized that I had rewritten that scene in my head where Saffron and Inara almost kiss. I convinced myself that they did.

haha oh gosh i wish they had. except then there wouldn’t have been the cute/funny/sad part at the end where mal is like “I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED” and inara is all “YES!” and mal is like “YOU KISSED” and inara is like “ugh, fucking moron.” but also i waited all season for kailey and inara to kiss, tell me you didn’t expect that to happen at least once?!?!

also my firefly/dollhouse/warren connection is more tenuous than i think i initially made it out to be, it basically hinges on the horrifically creepy episode where warren makes the robot girlfriend, and his perception of women as robots who should fulfill his desires and such. warren is basically the precursor to the worst clients rossum corp serves, and he’s also the mastermind topher that could create all the chaos, but he’s more sinister/cognizant than topher, if that makes sense??

I think we need to have some sort of Whedonverse theory swapping group or something because…

I had NEVER heard of the Warren tie (AND I WANT TO HEAR THIS), but the idea of Dollhouse and Firefly existing in the same shared universe has been fan theory for some time (and I think someone even once asked Joss about it?). It goes Rossum corp is in fact the precursor to Blue Sun and the phone call apocalypse is the major reason why earth was used up and the we left. The Doll tech was the first brain tech, but it failed, however Rossum continued to perfect it and evolve the tech as they became Blue Sun. So by the time we reach Firefly it’s been vastly improved, yet the human mind has evolved as well with the advent of Readers. So the tech is still flawed and it’s evident with their own chid prodigy, River Tam. Serenity’s crew is battling a problem with a mega-corporation that has a chokehold on the government that actually started 600 years ago with Echo and the Dolls.

i love the dollhouse/firefly potential connection, i am so new to the whole “verse” of whedon fandom, but i am so so so into it. i feel like i need a guide but also i’m having fun at home just journaling about all the subtext i see in buffy, so maybe i am doing okay on my own! see my response to brianna for a very cliff-notes version of my warren theory, but also i think i wasn’t super clear up there, i meant in my brain i think of warren as someone who COULD BE one of the worst clients, but also COULD HAVE BEEN the type of topher super brain the rossum corp brings on board, but i think warren would have asked more questions / tried to gain more power than topher ever did, and i think he’d be way less apologetic in the end…

Even though Alex just stole my thunder. I was going to do Call Your Girlfriend at the camp talent show and now my dreams have been crushed but only to be replaced by bigger dreams (dancing alone in my room in you do you undies). I hereby give Alex all my thunder.

This has nothing to do with your fundraiser, but iI just remembered it…Autostraddle was in my dream last night. I often dream about current pop culture, so I was not surprised by the dream. In it, I had to pull Riese, whom I obviously had never met, aside at a softball game, because duh, to tell her someone was trying to steal her website! It was very mystery, who done it sort of storyline with a softball game/ camping setting.

Maybe I’m putting the horse before the kart, but it would be really cool if the hypothetical Autostraddle app incorporated ASS for a Grindr-style thing.. might be a bit ambitious though. But autostraddle news on my phone would be neat!

You guys should do another poll after the campaign is over to see how the number of readers who donated has increased from your previous study! I’m sure there will be way less green people this time, I should know, I was one.

also I like Grace_B’s idea of the AS personals. I’m thinking Metafilter could be a good model of the social networking area – it’s not quite like Facebook or the old ASS, but you had a section that was all about getting advice, one for jobs, one for IRL meetups, one for music, one for site-related stuff, and the main site. Simple but very very effective. The way they do user profiles is pretty good too.

Yay! I thought that I’d missed my opportunity to get some (gluten-free) cookies, but they’re back.

(if I’m this excited about cookies now, imagine how happy I’m going to be when there is actually cookies. Cookies are totally the easiest way to my heart/wallet. It’s probably a good thing I’m allergic to most of them or else I’d just eat cookies for all of my meals.)

Y’all already have an accountant, especially for taxes, right? God, you’re going to have to record all the Indiegogo funds as regular income, aren’t you? There may be some tax strategy to “hiring” your writers to bake cookies and make the homemade cards (not kidding). Timing your spending matters for FYE taxes too! I’m sorry, you probably know all this. My inner accountant is curious/having a tiny panic attack.

Also, be sure to ask your accountant about crowdfunding options that will be available in the future per the JOBS Act.

Argh, I can’t get paid soon enough. I know this is going on for a while yet but I want to give you my money now only I haven’t been given it yet! It’s so wonderful to see how well things are going so far, though, and it’s great, and really encouraging, to see a plan for higher amounts.

I hardly ever comment on this site, but I’m seriously invested in seeing it/the whole AS team succeed. I will donate at least once more before this is done. I know it’s been said, but you impact so many lives in such a positive way. Thank you! Now take my money.

I just got closer to tears than I did when the lady I’ve been in love with for four years and I basically ended everything last month. I might be broken/completelyfucked emotionally if neither of these things managed to actually make me cry, but goddamn. I love you, Autostraddle. I have so little money to give you, but I’ll keep giving you whatever I can <3.

I can’t donate any more, but I have a small, extra incentive for those of you who can or have yet to. I know how you guys feel about gifs, so I made a handful of funny animated gifs from the fundraiser video and put them on a password-protected tumblr(straddlegifs.tumblr.com). I’ll make it public when the fundraiser hits, say, $65k. Sound okay?

What about Twitter donation drives? Riese or whoever can tweet “Everyone who donates in the next hour gets a shoutout!” and everyone who leaves their twitter handle in their funder comment get’s a tweeted thank you @ them.

…directly because of your actions there is a lesbian somewhere in the world with no girlfriend, crying into her security blanket over her poor life choices eating Ben and Jerrie’s Cherry Garcia, watching Friends re-runs and searching ‘Plenty of Fish’ looking for just one girl who doesn’t confuse ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ or look as if she smells of boiled ham.

that girl is me.

be sensible with girlfriend conservation and leave some for the rest of us.

Ah no, Pand, you mistake. People in poly relationships are not necessarily out of the dating pool (though some are). In fact, poly relationships can open *more* possible partners for single people who are looking for partners, since they can look further than just other single people. It is only a problem if those looking want their partners to be strictly monogamous, and that would have been a problem anyway, since the people in poly relationships were poly anyway.

Way to go, I need help trying to raise some funds to do the same thing the family of the great individual in Kentucky (Aaron Collins) who’s dying wish was to leave big tips ($500.00). Please check out my campaign to hear all the details. I will appreciate it if you guys can donate ANYTHING. If you can’t, at least help me by sharing my campaign. Thank you in advance.

Friends! We’re trying to raise funds for our queer foster youth film! We’re trying to get the FINISHED DVD to the youth for FREE–help us out here?! repost/contribute/share/love
…http://igg.me/p/299939/x/8507

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